Lyuben Karavelov

Lyuben Karavelov (1834-21 January 1879) was a Bulgarian revolutionary leader during the 1870s. He was the brother of Prime Minister Petko Karavelov.

Biography
Lyuben Karavelov was born in Koprivshtitsa, Ottoman Empire in 1834, the older brother of Petko Karavelov. While apprenticing in Constantinople in 1856, he developed a strong interest in politics, the Crimean War, and ethnography. In 1857, he met several Russian revolutionary democrats while studying at the University of Moscow, and he took part in student riots in 1861. He began to write poetry and long short stories in Bulgarian, and, in 1867, he became a correspondent for a Russian newspaper in Belgrade, publishing prose and journalism in Serbian. In 1868, he was forced to leave for Novi Sad, Austria-Hungary due to his contacts with Serbian revolutionaries, and he settled in Bucharest, Romania in 1869. He worked for the Svoboda newspaper from 1869 to 1873, and, in 1870, he became Chairman of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee, working with Internal Revolutionary Organization leader Vasil Levski. Karavelov admired the political systems of Switzerland and the United States, praising the American public education system and their relative emancipation of women. From 1873 to 1874, he and Hristo Botev published a second newspaper, the nationalist publication Nezavisimost. Levski's execution in 1873 demoralized Karavelov, and he ultimately decided to become an apolitical writer once again, much to Botev's anger. He died in Ruse in 1879, shortly after Bulgaria's liberation.